When Simon Carless commissioned The Ascent of the Gothic Tower for the video games-themed StoryBundle from earlier this year, we agreed the game should be released on a non-commercial basis at some future time, and further we agreed that future time should be September. Friends, it is September right now!
You can now play Gothic Tower online or download the story file to play in a different interpreter if you insist. In either case I hope you’ll let me know what you think of it!
NOTE: I played a little further in EarthBound and I realized that this post only makes like 45% sense. Maybe I should revise it? Hmm.
I’ve been replaying EarthBound on the Wii U Virtual Console and thinking a lot about the decisions involved in constructing its narrative. A particular choice caught my attention, and I am going to analyze it here, but since it involves spoilers from the tail end of the game, and because I have a feeling you might not care about EarthBound at all, I will place my analysis on the other side of a break thingy.
Recently I have been able to edit and upload three(!) episodes of the text adventure podcast that I do with Jenni Polodna. Our last recording session was with Jeremy Freese; we played his game Violet and my game The Statue Got Me High and it was all very pleasant. You will enjoy listening to all of it!
Did you know that you can subscribe to said podcast on iTunes? Just search the iTunes store for “Clash of the Type-Ins” and it’ll pop up there, probably.
Emily Boegheim and I have put together a post-competition release of our game Robin & Orchid, and you can play the new version here. Any bugs, typos, inconsistencies, or omissions in this version are definitely intentional.
In which we finish playing Taco Fiction. boop!
There’s a new episode of that text adventure podcast up now. In it, Jenni and Emily begin playing my game Taco Fiction, which you can play online here if you so choose.
The episode where Jenni and Emily finish playing Taco Fiction should follow shortly. I hope.
There is a new episode of a podcast over at the home of the podcast. Jenni and I played It by Emily Boegheim.
The next episode of the podcast will appear in less than two months.
The new StoryBundle features a selection of books about video games that will interest you, as well as a sub-bundle of text adventures I wrote! The Gothic Tower & Assorted Interactive Fiction includes a few games you can play over here at this website, but critically it includes The Ascent of the Gothic Tower, which was commissioned by Simon Carless specifically for this StoryBundle.
One of the other games, titled So, You’ve Never Played a Text Adventure Before, Huh?, was first released in this bundle but is available for free as well. You can play it online even. I recommend it to anyone who has never played a text adventure before.
The bundle also also includes the ebook of “MOTORCYCLUS” and Other Extremely Scary Stories”! Functionally what is going on here is you can pay any amount you wish—the minimum of three dollars, if you want—for my book of scary stories.
Oh. Oh, no. What have I done?
I don’t even know where to start!
When Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder took fourth place in IF Comp 2013, I was lucky enough to pick the prize I had been eyeing for the duration of the judging period: a translation of the game into French, donated by Hugo Labrande.
Well, just in time for my birthday, Hugo has finished the translation, and now Le butin du Capitaine Verdeterre is available for your francophone enjoyment! I’m freaking out over here!
At my request, Hugo also translated all of my comments in the source code, and included comments in English on the translation: There are puns that don’t make any sense in French, puns that make more sense in French, all kinds of stuff. In the first section there’s a long series of words I wrote (in English) about my decision not to fix a bunch of bugs. You should be checking it out right now.
Thank you so much, Hugo!!!
A second episode of Clash of the Type-Ins is live. That is all.